Dear Mr. Navarrette:

Thank you for being one of the few media voices lately who has come to Tom Cruise's defense over his comments about the overdrugging of children and psychiatry's chemical imbalance myth. I am a former mental health professional, and my husband and I track this issue very closely, doing hours of research every week and communicating with doctors and watchdog groups to understand what is really happening behind psychiatry's marketing facade.

Cruise is speaking truth that many people just don't know, thanks to slick drug company marketing and the psychology industry's insistence that over half of America is mentally ill and in need of their services. Americans need to realize that drug companies and the "helping" profession are for-profit enterprises. If the truth of the chemical imbalance myth were to get out, the profession would crumble. Cruise attacked a multi-BILLION dollar industry right at the root. Of course a lot of people aren't happy with him - their paychecks depend on the myth continuing.

Now it's time for us to stop entrusting our lives to the "professionals", and start asking some basic questions: How do we know we have a mental disorder like depression, anxiety, ADHD, or bipolar, without objective test results from our doctor? We wouldn't believe a doctor's cancer diagnosis without proof--then why do we blindly believe a subjective mental diagnosis without proof? Do I even have a mental disorder at all, or is my behavior just a normal part of living? What the psychology industry considers "normal" has become extremely narrow, thanks to their hundreds of labels for every life experience imaginable.

We have millions of adults and school children on brain-damaging, mind-altering psychiatric drugs because they have bought into the biggest PR lie of the last few decades: blame it on the brain, and pop a pill to fix it. Instead of taking a psychiatric drug that could cause hallucinations, agitation, and even suicide and murder (as the FDA is now finally admitting), we need to consider more healthy, common-sense approaches to our mental health woes: good diet, sleep, exercise, friendships, family, religion, and plain-old bearing up and plowing through it.

No great man or woman was ever formed by good feelings and mood pills, but by pain, difficulty, lessons, and growth. It's called life. Let's stop believing those who stand to gain from psychiatric diseases and drugs, and support Tom Cruise--a man who stands to gain nothing but ridicule and the satisfaction of speaking the truth. Let's start pushing back on the legal drug pushers who numb our culture in the name of help.

Lisa Bazler, M.A.

Ryan Bazler, MBA

Carlsbad, California